Still Raining

[Larryk007]

What happens to the pitcher during the rain delay?
A 32-minute delay during the fifth inning seemed to have no affect my starting pitcher's fatigue.

I think there was a post earlier.
Thanks

[eauhomme]

Short delays have little to no effect. Longer ones can completely gas a guy. What the dividing line is, I don't know.

[Sweed]

If you use the warm up option, keep in mind after a rain delay any P you bring in immediately after the delay will be warm. A short delay, as eauhomme, won't have a big effect, but as a general rule if I keep the same P in the game I will start warming someone up in case he runs out of gas. That can sometimes happen very quickly, depending on the length of the delay. It only takes about three batters to get warm and it's better to have a P ready than to wish you had.

[kq76]

Originally Posted by eauhomme

Short delays have little to no effect. Longer ones can completely gas a guy. What the dividing line is, I don't know.

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

It has to be a legit rain delay (where it tells you the game was delayed for XXX minutes), not just the "it's started raining" messages. I know there's different affects on pitchers (short delays are fine, but at some point it starts to eat into pitcher fatigue), but I believe any delay a new reliever is considered "warm".

https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...91&postcount=5

So the dividing line is, I guess, if it tells you the minutes.

[Matt Arnold]

Not every "long" delay will fatigue the current pitcher. Maybe in the end he might tire an inning earlier than normal with a small enough delay. But yes, sometimes a larger delay can make them nearly completely fatigued.

[uruguru]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

Not every "long" delay will fatigue the current pitcher. Maybe in the end he might tire an inning earlier than normal with a small enough delay. But yes, sometimes a larger delay can make them nearly completely fatigued.

Can you explain the rationale of a pitcher becoming fatigued while not pitching? I'm just a little confused about this.

[kq76]

I don't think it's about fatigue, I think it's about the arm going cold and you don't want to warm it up again. Why don't you not want to warm it up again I'm unclear on, but I've definitely heard MLB people say you don't want to warm up a reliever more than twice so I can kind of see why you wouldn't want to warm up a starter again too.

Also, while I've never pitched, the closest I can relate is from some hard yard work. I can go dig out a tree stump or chop some wood for a while no problem, but ask me to do some more after taking a half hour or so break and that's just asking for some serious back pain. Why I have no idea.

[Larryk007]

From my experience, rain delays that last an hour, most pitchers do not return. I think OOTP should change the reasoning and be more in line with what is the experience.

[kq76]

Originally Posted by Larryk007

... I think OOTP should change the reasoning and be more in line with what is the experience.

What do you mean by that? I'm not arguing against it, I just genuinely don't know what you mean.

[jksander]

Originally Posted by kq76

I don't think it's about fatigue, I think it's about the arm going cold and you don't want to warm it up again. Why don't you not want to warm it up again I'm unclear on, but I've definitely heard MLB people say you don't want to warm up a reliever more than twice so I can kind of see why you wouldn't want to warm up a starter again too.

Also, while I've never pitched, the closest I can relate is from some hard yard work. I can go dig out a tree stump or chop some wood for a while no problem, but ask me to do some more after taking a half hour or so break and that's just asking for some serious back pain. Why I have no idea.

It's like my old job working in junk mail printing ... I'd have a room full of industrial printers, I had to keep them all loaded with paper (so 10 printers, each holding 4,800 sheets of 11x17 stock, printing at a rate of 68 sheets per minute) ... keeping the circuit loaded steadily while working I could go for hours and not feel worn down. But if I took my 30-minute lunch break and sat down, coming back was brutal ... you'd have to literally load all ten printers in a circuit from scratch). So I'd spend the second half of my shift wishing I was dead. But if I skipped lunch, or grazed between the printers and my desk, I could work a 12 hour shift and not feel like I'd killed myself.

So compare that to a pitcher who has the stamina to go a full game on a regular basis ... the fifteen minute breaks on the bench while players bat isn't enough to cool his arm, but a 30 or 45 or 60 minute break for a rain delay suddenly has him starting from scratch. So I can see how that would physically be rough to essentially have to go through a pre-game warm-up to get the arm moving again. Even if he did have the energy to handle it, it would definitely take some innings off his day.

[Larryk007]

I have only my experiences, IMO the starting pitcher after an hour of rain delay does not return to the game. I don't think I have seen a pitcher return. My suggestion is OOTP should fatigue the starting pitcher, so the team has to find a replacement.

[Rain King]

Originally Posted by uruguru

Can you explain the rationale of a pitcher becoming fatigued while not pitching? I'm just a little confused about this.

There are a lot of factors to this.

One is afterburn. Pitchers are pretty hyped up, generally, while pitching. That doesn't just go away the minute they stop. Their body is still burning some energy and consuming additional oxygen for a while after they sit down. That is fatiguing.

Other pieces have been covered. The arm gets tight and requires re-warming up...which is more energy expended, etc.

The guy doesn't go onto a shelf when the rain delay starts just to be pulled back off of it when the game resumes.

[OutS|der]

Originally Posted by Larryk007

I have only my experiences, IMO the starting pitcher after an hour of rain delay does not return to the game. I don't think I have seen a pitcher return. My suggestion is OOTP should fatigue the starting pitcher, so the team has to find a replacement.

How would this would with historical play? I'm not so sure a 1hr delay would take out pitchers who do 600+ innings in a year. They can just keep pitching to stay warm.

[Larryk007]

My comments were directed toward the current modern game. Thinking of the 100 plus years of baseball and how that would affect pitching fatigue is way beyond me. I guess some type of eras default.

[uruguru]

Originally Posted by kq76

I don't think it's about fatigue, I think it's about the arm going cold and you don't want to warm it up again. Why don't you not want to warm it up again I'm unclear on, but I've definitely heard MLB people say you don't want to warm up a reliever more than twice so I can kind of see why you wouldn't want to warm up a starter again too.

ok, thanks. I just assumed that during a rain delay the pitcher would be periodically soft-tossing somewhere to prevent that. But if that's not a thing, then I get it.

I grew up watching professional baseball under a roof.

[kq76]

Originally Posted by uruguru

ok, thanks. I just assumed that during a rain delay the pitcher would be periodically soft-tossing somewhere to prevent that. But if that's not a thing, then I get it.

I grew up watching professional baseball under a roof.

Well even if they were doing that, which they very well might sometimes be doing somewhere in the bowels of the stadium, you'd think they'd lose some stamina from doing it, right?

I don't know. I wish we had a trainer or a doctor amongst us who could give us more insight into this. Do we?

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

Not every "long" delay will fatigue the current pitcher. Maybe in the end he might tire an inning earlier than normal with a small enough delay. But yes, sometimes a larger delay can make them nearly completely fatigued.

Coming back to this I find it very interesting and I wonder why we're not showing the drop in stamina immediately once they come back from a rain delay (I haven't checked it, but I'm pretty sure that's true). Similarly, after a reliever warms up for the 2nd or 3rd time and finally does come into the game, why do we have their stamina indicator starting at full and not somewhere not full? This is especially noticeable when they've warmed up too long, their status says tiring, but once you bring them in the indicator is still at full.

Is there a good reason behind this or did we just do it that way in the first place and never reconsidered it? I get from your post that the indicator just moves faster sometimes and I think that's my experience too, especially with good pitchers who can usually get pretty far into a game before needing to be relieved. But wouldn't it be better for the user experience if the indicator moved during delays and warming up? They'd have a better idea of how gas the pitcher had left. I get that managers don't know exactly how much gas a pitcher has left and some days they might have more than others, but surely they have some formula for warming up or soft tossing and how that affects how much the pitcher probably has left. If the indicator sometimes moves faster than it normally does I think that's fine, but I also think we should have the indicator move between delays and warming up too.

[Pelican]

A short rain delay could be little different (from the pitcher's standpoint) from a long inning for the pitcher's team. In either case, he might be sitting for fifteen or twenty minutes before going back out. The problem is, a pitcher's arm begins to lose its flexibility after that. Sure, he could try to stay limber by tossing or stretching, but eventually that will tire him out. For a delay as long as an hour, IRL it is risky sending that SP back out. He would have to warm up all over again, and for his arm it would be more like pitching both ends of a DH. So it makes good sense for OOTP to use the fatigue metric to reflect that a SP loses stamina after a long rain delay. Taking the risk of sending a guy back out there, after an hour of sitting, should also increase the risk of injury. As a house rule, I don't send a SP back out after a long rain delay.

[TomVeal]

Surely there are, in the mass of baseball statistics, data on how often pitchers return after rain delays of x, y or z minutes and how well they perform when they do.

[Rain King]

I'm sure there is, but I would also think that data is going to be extremely noisy once you account for where in the game the delay occurred.